Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma calls Ramaphosa a would-be dictator as Ekurhuleni murders go unanswered

Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma has accused President Cyril Ramaphosa of protecting infrastructure and relationships that benefit him rather than the people he governs, and of sending police, secret agents and intelligence operatives to Moore Road to detain activists while the killings and dumping of women in Ekurhuleni went without a response.

The March and March leader put the charge in a post on X, and South Africans answered it in numbers. The replies are sharply split, and they are worth reading closely, because they set out the argument the country is actually having about immigration, policing and who the state works for.

Her claim is that Ramaphosa’s priorities are misaligned. She said the President failed to respond to the killings and dumping of women in Ekurhuleni while he was reportedly unwell, and then recovered in time to campaign for the African National Congress. She also said the mobilisation of law enforcement against people protesting illegal immigration was swift in a way the response to those killings was not, with police drawn from across the country and intelligence operatives deployed to Moore Road to detain activists rather than to address foreign nationals or engage their governments.

“A President who cares more about protecting infrastructure and relationships that are beneficial to him than his own people? That is not a leader at all, just someone itching to be a dictator,” she wrote.

That is the accusation. It is her characterisation of the President’s conduct, and the record it rests on is the one she names: the Ekurhuleni killings, the Moore Road detentions, the army, and what she described as the revival of apartheid-era laws.

What South Africans are arguing about in the replies is not whether the load exists. It is what a president is supposed to do about it. One reply asked whether Ramaphosa should stand back while a repeat of the 2021 unrest unfolds, or applaud while marchers become violent and beat people in the streets. Another warned that going against the President is not a good idea. A third said the problem is not the President but the voters who back parties that support illegal immigration. One reply said the President was playing golf after the gender-based violence in Kempton Park and called him an oppressor. Another said simply that the man is managed badly.

Those are the terms of the public argument, and they are the terms this paper reports them in. The anger at the killings is real. The demand that the state act on illegal immigration is real. The dispute is over who is failing whom, and the replies show South Africans do not agree on the answer.

Ngobese-Zuma has also taken her argument to the Local Government Elections. Speaking in Durban, she urged supporters to vote for the right candidates and warned that staying home could hand power back to the wrong people, as protests over illegal immigration drew a major security response.

Briefly News reported her post and the reaction to it on 27 October 2026.

The Enquirer’s own reading of the record is that the substance of her charge, that enforcement was mobilised against activists at Moore Road while the Ekurhuleni killings went unanswered, is a question the state has not answered in public, and the replies to her post show South Africans intend to keep asking it. What this paper will do next is put that question to the Presidency and to the South African Police Service, and report what they say about the deployment at Moore Road and the response to the Ekurhuleni killings.